Representative Paul Gosar (R., Ariz.) demanded answers from four federal agencies concerning their ongoing funding of EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan lab-associated nongovernmental organization that has received upwards of $50 million in taxpayer money since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
Gosar, citing research from taxpayer-watchdog group White Coat Waste Project, asked the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, and U.S. Agency for International Development what their combined total of $50 million was used for. In letters sent to each of the respective agencies on Monday, the Arizona Republican requested specifics about total funding to EcoHealth, any active projects with the nonprofit, research on weapons of mass destruction, EcoHealth collaborators, research in foreign countries, and gain-of-function research.
“EHA does not deserve any taxpayer support after what happened in Wuhan and its years of empty promises of predicting and preventing pandemics and instead probably causing one,” Gosar wrote in each of the four letters.
EcoHealth pulled in at least $10 million from the NIH, $27 million from the Pentagon, $263,801 from the NSF, and $14 million from USAID, according to the congressman’s correspondence with the agencies.
Apart from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab from where it is believed the coronavirus leaked in 2020, the White Coat Waste Project has documented how the NIH has spent $8 million to help EcoHealth build a new bat research lab and breeding colony at Colorado State University. As part of this venture, the public-health NGO imported hundreds of bats from Asia to the U.S. in order to infect them with deadly viruses, including Ebola and Covid-19, for scientific research.
White Coat Waste Project senior vice president Justin Goodman said he “applauded” Gosar for looking into the funding of the reported experiments.
“Taxpayers have a right to know how their money is being spent, and we’re grateful to Rep. Gosar for demanding answers and fighting this reckless government spending on animal experiments that threaten public health,” Goodman said in a statement provided to National Review.
While the House recently passed his amendment to the fiscal year 2024 NIH spending bill in order to defund EcoHealth grants on the basis of such research, Gosar is not the only lawmaker at the forefront of this issue. Early last month, Senators Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) and Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) also sought answers from the NIH on an American taxpayer-funded lab in Montana that reportedly experimented on Egyptian fruit bats with coronaviruses over a year before the pandemic.
Gosar requested the four agencies answer his questions by December 15.
“It’s disgraceful that government agencies continue to give tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to the group that’s responsible for funneling Fauci’s federal money to the CCP-controlled Wuhan Institute of Virology for risky gain-of-function research that started a pandemic,” said Gosar. “The agencies responsible for this wasteful spending must be held accountable.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as chief medical advisor to the president and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before retiring at the end of 2022, previously testified to the Senate that the federal government did not fund gain-of-function research at the lab in Wuhan, China. Last week, it was announced that Fauci would testify again about the issue in January, this time before the House.